Brazilians Take To Streets In Cars To Demand Impeachment of Bolsonaro Over Covid Disaster
- 'Motorcade rallies call for impeachment of Bolsonaro in Brazil. Protests take place across country at what many see as president’s shambolic Covid response. The Guardian, Jan. 24, 2021.
Thousands of Brazilians have taken to the streets in their cars to demand Jair Bolsonaro’s impeachment as polls showed support for the far-right president slipping over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. On Saturday, as Brazil’s official Covid-19 death toll hit 216,000, leftwing and centrist protesters organised motorcade rallies in more than 20 state capitals, including Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte and Belém.
The leftwing leader Guilherme Boulos told objectors parading through São Paulo the rallies signalled the start of “a popular uprising against this genocidal government”.
“We’re here to announce that we aren’t going to wait until [the next presidential election in] 2022, because lives are at stake. Now’s the time to defeat Jair Bolsonaro,” Boulos told the car-bound dissenters. “He’s going to leave the presidency and go straight to jail.” On Sunday, rightwing groups held their own pro-impeachment events, including in Barra da Tijuca, a bastion of Bolsonaro support in west Rio.
- Social movements and trade unions across the country in caravans call for impeachment.
An online petition being promoted by conservative former supporters has attracted more than 180,000 signatures in three days. “President Bolsonaro is a curse on Brazil and … it’s up to us, the people, to secure his removal,” it says, accusing the president of endangering thousands of lives with his anti-scientific response to Covid.
Lucas Paulino, a lawyer who helped organise a rally in Belo Horizonte, said demonstrators were driven by the horrifying healthcare collapse happening hundreds of miles north in the Amazon. In recent days dozens of patients have died in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, after a surge in Covid infections and a catastrophic lack of planning caused hospitals to run out of oxygen. Brazil’s health minister, Eduardo Pazuello – whose critics call him “Pezadello” (nightmare) – travelled to the city only to promote bogus “early treatments” such as hydroxychloroquine.
“That really showed us the extent of the federal government’s dereliction of duty and denialism towards the Covid pandemic,” said Paulino, 32, a regional leader for a progressive political group called Acredito (I Believe).
“The feeling that this negligence, this anti-democratic extremism, this denial of science, this omission, this glorification of authoritarianism, can no longer be allowed to continue was trapped in the throats of many Brazilians,” Paulino added...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/24/brazil-rallies-bolsonaro-impeachment-covid-response
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- 'A complete massacre, a horror film’: inside Brazil's Covid disaster.' Hospitals in Amazonas state overwhelmed after surge in infections linked to new variant, leaving many without even the most basic supplies. The Guardian, Jan. 24,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/24/brazil-covid-coronavirus-deaths-cases-amazonas-state